How to Make a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 Carrier Board in KiCad - Part 1 | Digi-Key Electronics

Raspberry Pi released the Compute Module 4 (CM4) in October, which is a single board computer with all of the processing power of the Raspberry Pi 4, but in a tiny form factor! It removes many of the connectors (USB, HDMI, etc.), as the intention is for you to add your own with a custom board and enclosure.

The CM4 is not intended to be a desktop replacement (like the RPi 4) but rather to be used in industrial or professional cases where you might need an SBC embedded in, say, a robot.

In this series, we’ll show you how to create your own, custom Raspberry Pi CM4 carrier board with KiCad!

The video shows you how to work with hierarchical sheets in KiCad and add custom components. You can find pre-made schematic symbols and footprints for some components on Ultra Librarian or SnapEDA.

We add USB-C power, USB 2.0 data (client mode), LEDs, a Qwiic/Stemma connector, and a basic header to the CM4 carrier board. While this particular board has not been tested (yet) when this video was released, we hope that this video helps you create your own carrier board!

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[johnlocke]

Incredibly appreciative for this! For the extreme beginners like me, I will say this is incredibly fast. I know it's difficulty to chose between appealing to beginners or experienced people. I think it was probably the right choice to assume the audience already knows what they are doing, so I still think it's great...but as a beginner, a little tough to follow all the renaming and file moving etc. Mostly just not familiar with the clunky process of finding and importing part diagrams/models which seems a bit convoluted from a noob perspective. Thank you thank you thank you!

[Quarky_]

Amazing tutorial! You have a strangely clear and succinct way of presenting such complicated technical steps. I have also been following your FreeRTOS series, just amazing!

[VAAYG]

Wow very practical, this is what makes CM so practical for any project. Looking forward to the rest

[AnthoBasc]

"i'm a rebel, i'm going [...] metric" --> subscribed! joke aside, thank you so much, I'm trying to make a 6 CMP4 carrier for a cluster and this helped a lot

[PlasticCant]

Thank you. I'm really excited about this series. I can't wait for the next one!

[Speechsupply]

Super Nice idea to make this walkthrough!

[RohitBanerjee]

Landed here to learn more about custom carrier board design for CM4, stayed here for the pink shirt and bowtie, and the metric system pride.

[stephenvalente]

Thanks very much for doing this series. Much appreciated.

[nitinj.sanket]

Can't wait for part 2. Amazing tutorial Shawn :)

[annacersongor]

Can't wait for part 2, thanks a lot

[frankbose]

hey thats what my lab looks like digikey boxes everywhere

[WACOMalt]

Extremely useful video, but as someone with 0 experience in KiCAD I had to watch at 0.25x speed for some of the parts where you dont say what key you pressed or the mouse movement was too fast due to the sped up video (or you're just super fast with your clicks!)

[JazzTechie]

Just made it to part 3. Only thing I don't like about this series is it doesn't explain how to determine what components you actually need (what needs to be there) during the design
phase. I can start off with a high level thing I want to accomplish (I wish the PCB was this size, has 10 USB ports. Sd card port, activity LEDs, keyboard and video ribbon cable ports, etc), but what resistors, transistors, diodes, etc need to be present in the circuits? Wish there was a more automated tool that fills that in for you.

[niclash]

@Digi-Key The many ERC problems that "look OK to me" is often that you don't have "Power Flags" for power supply inputs and ground pins. If you put them at their respective IN and terminations, those problems go away and the rest are probably "Not Connected" errors, which could be disabled in settings.

[spacewolfjr]

Very cool, thanks Shawn! I don't know if you follow Ben Eater but he's been designing this 6502 based computer (including VGA card from just ICs like gates!), it's all on a breadboard now but I was thinking it would be a fun project to have it available as a PCB for soldering.

[v]

I know im a bit of a stickler for pronunciation but please dont say "keykad" when you say KiCAD.

On a completely relevant note, this is an awesome video. This will get me started on a couple of things I want to do related to my game station and all of my modified consoles.

[markconger]

I’m glad you made this video series because it answered my primary question: can I do this myself and make a custom CM4 carrier board. The answer is, unfortunately, no. I don’t have the electronics knowledge for it. But I am lifelong IT.

So my question: Where do I go to find and hire an experienced board designer who can design the custom CM4 board I want?

Basically, I want a Pi400 built around the CM4 and has an M.2 slot for NVMe storage.

How do I go about finding the person to do this?

[geekrulz]

You know when filling in the date for the sheet. You can exprot it to other sheets by ticking the checkbox on te right

[sekharkumarbasu]

how did you added the gpio port please help me out

[ectoven]

Place NC connectors on empty pins and your ERC will pass like a charm.